A common excuse heard from people who have been drinking is that they didn’t really know what they were doing because they were drunk. Now, new research by Bruce Bartholow suggests that people are in fact aware of what they are doing while drinking and continue to misbehave because they believe it will be excused by the alcohol they have consumed.
Sarah Hauer in the Marquette Tribune reports that the research was conducted at Marquette University where Bartholow is a professor. He divided a group of 67 volunteers into three groups: all three were given beverages to drink that they thought contained alcohol. Groups one and two were given a placebo instead. The drinks continued until the third group had a blood alcohol level of .09, just over the legal driving limit in most state. Next all three groups were asked to perform tasks on a computer where they matched pictures to other pictures or words, then were asked how well they thought they did. After looking at how the volunteers performed, Bartholow was able to see that those who had the real alcohol were just as likely to admit to the mistakes they’d made as those given the placebo, indicating that they were fully aware of the mistakes they were making as they went along in the test. Bartholow says this proves that people are actually aware of what they are doing when drinking, but carry on regardless, either because they no longer fear the consequences of their actions or because they believe their behavior will be excused later when they can blame it on the alcohol.
While this is not the first study to show that people are aware of what they are doing, it does appear to be the first to show how casually the effect can be made to occur. Thus, it also seems to show that social convention has at least as much to do with people’s perceptions of their own actions as does the alcohol they are consuming. Or in other words, because it’s become so common for people to blame alcohol for their actions while drinking that it has become a social norm, which in and of itself can cause people to blame the effects of alcohol for the things they’ve done, and for others to allow it as a reasonably valid excuse.
Bartholow says that while people blaming their behavior on alcohol is understandable, based on the evidence, it’s clearly not a valid excuse though.